To my father

As far back as I look into my childhood, I believe I have always known, at least in broad outline, the story of my father and his family… This story, far from being foreign to me, is part of my own; it shaped my imagination, forged some of my values, and probably also guided some of my choices. The story I am telling today1 is also and above all that of someone who helped to make history…

Jacquot Szmulewicz, my father, took an active part in the Resistance, and many works have given an account of his heroic action. Today the trend is toward considering these resisters of the shadows—and foreigners into the bargain—who belonged to the Main-d’Œuvre Immigrée (MOI, the immigrant labor organization), but for years, and this from the Liberation onward, their struggle was passed over in silence.2 Recognition began with very small steps toward the mid-1970s and accelerated in the decade that followed.

I will recall a few salient facts of his life from his birth in Poland to his militant engagement in civilian life, dwelling on the war years, which led him to take up arms in what has been called “urban guerrilla warfare.” The coherence of his trajectory, at once singular and typical, takes on, in my view, a self-evident character, the moment I compare it with that of his friends who fought at his side in the ranks of the FTP-MOI of Lyon and Grenoble. When one questions my father, one is astonished at the acuity of his memory. He knows how to tell a story, with honesty, and when he speaks, one can easily picture the scenes: the past resurges through his account. His testimony very directly nourishes the lines that follow.

Life in Poland

Jacob (Yenkle) Szmulewicz, known as “Jacquot,” was born in Poland on July 9, 1924. The only boy in a family of six children, he occupied the fifth place among them.

The family lived in a small house at Siucice, a village of some three hundred souls, sixty kilometers south of Łódź, near Piotrków. The Łódź community formed, in numbers, before the Second World War, the second-largest Jewish community, after that of Warsaw. The Jews there represented a third of the inhabitants.

Of his childhood in Poland, he keeps in memory certain privileged moments, most of which have to do with nature and the agricultural activities that punctuated village life: the carts returning after the harvest, following a lane and crossing a bridge, carrying, perched atop the crops, the peasants armed with their scythes; the great cold that announced the pleasure of skating on the pond at the edge of the village; and in summer, the various gatherings of berries, blackberries, raspberries, and sloes, and the collecting of stubble, with which the children amused themselves making flour.

Life was rather hard: one lived on little and was cramped for space. Yet, if money did not flow freely, one did not go hungry. Simon (Simsia), Jacquot’s father, bought and sold livestock; the family owned a small orchard, in which apples, pears, and damson plums grew. In a countryside dominated by a barter economy, everything was an object of exchange: from the fruit she gathered, the mother of the family obtained potatoes and eggs from the peasants living not far from her home.

In the Szmulewicz household, the religious traditions were followed: Jacquot’s mother, Brandla, wore a “shaytl,” that is, a wig, which she covered, moreover, with a shawl, and the family possessed a triple set of dishes, so as not to mix meat, fish, and dairy.

As early as 1929, Simon left Poland definitively for France. Poverty decided his departure, as it had for thousands of other Jews at the same time.3 He took with him his eldest daughter, Nadia, and his half-sister. His wife remained in Poland, with her five children. To earn a little money, she made cakes and jams from the various berries she and her children had gathered, which she went to sell in the village; she also received on her little terrace the Jews of the village who came to play cards and drink tea.

Arrival in Paris and the school years

One fine day in January 1931, Brandla Szmulewicz left in her turn, with children and baggage. Her brothers and sisters, already settled in Paris, had pooled their money to bring her over; Simon’s meager wage as a butcher’s boy could never have sufficed.

The family settled at 18 rue Bourg-Tibourg, in the Marais quarter. This quarter was the “pletzl” (the little square in Yiddish), in which pious and observant Jews gathered. In Jacquot’s building, as in all those of the quarter, lived families of very modest income. The apartment, located on the fourth floor, consisted of two small rooms in which the family crowded together, the two eldest girls being lodged elsewhere.

On arriving in Paris, Jacquot was enrolled at the school on rue des Hospitalières-Saint-Gervais. The beginnings were not easy: at home, only Yiddish was spoken, and at recess or in the street, it was still in Yiddish that one communicated. Jacquot learned his first words of French from kindly neighbors.

The family stayed about a year in the Marais, then Monsieur Szmulewicz went to set up on his own in the 20th arrondissement: he opened a kosher butcher’s shop at 55 rue Bisson. The family moved and settled at number 34 rue des Couronnes. In addition to this lodging, too small to accommodate the eight people of the family, Jacquot’s father rented a small room on rue Vilin, at the very end of a long corridor, with no window.

The child was then enrolled at the school on rue Ramponneau. It was one of the toughest schools in Paris, in the opinion of those who attended it. The classes, overcrowded, held between thirty-five and forty pupils, most of them children of immigrants. Jacquot loved school and learned fairly quickly. He went over his lessons on the way, between the school and the butcher’s shop, then he went to lend a hand to his two neighbors, Étienne Raczymow and Gaston Largeault, to do their homework.

This did not prevent him from getting into mischief. In the band of children of rue Bisson, he passed for a kind of ringleader—whence the nickname he had earned of “Yankl der lobus” (“Jacquot the rascal”). He had a knack for leading the others to commit petty thefts with him, not very wicked ones it must be admitted, but which were always severely punished.

At home, the upbringing continued to be religious. Simon Szmulewicz frequented the synagogue located at the corner of rue Julien-Lacroix and rue Pali-Kao, which had just been built in 1931. Jacquot had begun to frequent the synagogue from the age of eight or nine, and he went there very regularly after school—but as much to play dodgeball on the terrace as for the religious instruction dispensed there. He became bar mitzvah at thirteen, but the event was accompanied by no celebration; the family had no money for that.4

What were the principal activities of a child before the war? At school, the children went first of all to the secular youth club on Thursdays: from Belleville, they set off for the Bois de Vincennes to get some air and gather tadpoles. They also went to the cinema, which, in the 1930s, screened many gangster films and swashbucklers: they felt for the latter, which echoed their own games, a veritable passion. In summer, the holidays took place around Paris: at Montfermeil, Montgeron, Brévannes, Brunoy. The family rented, for the two months, a small house, and the eldest sisters (Rose or Dora) looked after the youngest. As for the parents, who worked at the butcher’s shop, they came on weekends, for two days. Jacquot had discovered the pleasures of the water, on the Marne at Créteil, and had learned to swim all by himself, in a creek.

In those years 1935–1936, Jacquot was not very politicized. Neither were those around him. It was his neighbors, Henri Badever and Gaston Largeault, who first sowed the seeds of political consciousness in his mind. In 1936 or 1937, on their advice, he joined the “Pionniers Rouges” (Red Pioneers): with other children, he went to collect money and clothing on the Boulevard de Belleville, for the fighters of the International Brigades.5 He did not understand at the time, however, what was at stake; he acted above all by mimicry.

In 1937, he successfully passed his certificat d’études (primary school certificate), which was then anything but a formality. At the Ramponneau school, few got that far. But of course, given the family situation, there was no question of pursuing further studies; every pair of hands was needed for work. Since school had become compulsory, from 1936, until the age of fourteen, Jacquot did one more special year at the school on rue Julien-Lacroix, then entered into apprenticeship as a tailor’s apprentice.

The beginning of the war

In March 1939, Jacquot’s mother died. She was fifty-three; Jacquot fifteen. With his father, he said the Kaddish6 at the synagogue, morning and evening, for more than six months. By that date, three sisters had already left the household: in 1935, Rose had married Albert Gottlib and their daughter Florence was born the same year. In 1936, it was Nadia’s turn to marry Adolphe (Aaron) Cyrulnik and to give birth to their son Boris in 1937.

In September 1939, war was declared. Rumors circulated to the effect that the Germans were going to drop bombs on Paris. Simon Szmulewicz closed the butcher’s shop. Albert, Rose’s husband, proposed leaving the capital and taking the whole family to Bordeaux, where Nadia, Adolphe, and their little boy lived. Few then were the privileged ones who owned a car. Albert had one for professional reasons: as a drummer (he accompanied a famous comedian of the time, Champi), he needed to transport his drum kit on tour.

At Bordeaux, Nadia welcomed everyone. Albert obtained from the mayor a refugee allowance for each member of the family (5.25 francs per person per day), which made it possible to subsist for some time. Then, as the situation seemed calm, he decided to go back to Paris. Jacquot stayed. In September, in the Bordeaux vineyards, hands were wanted. Adolphe proposed to Jacquot that he do the grape harvest. But, after ten days, Adolphe was forced to leave: he had received his marching orders to rejoin the Foreign Legion. He went off to the army and was sent to the front line.

Jacquot harvested grapes for six weeks, then returned to his sister’s, now alone with her son. By day, she kept on the market a stall two meters long in which she sold haberdashery. Jacquot set off in search of work: he was first hired as an assistant preparer and delivery boy in a Bordeaux pharmacy, then he sold fritters in the street, before finding a position as a page at the cinema Le Fémina. He was finally a bellboy at the Hôtel Continental, one of the chic hotels of the city. The members of the government, who had fled the capital, were lodging there. The work was relatively comfortable, and Jacquot would no doubt have continued at it for some time had German officers not in turn taken over the hotel, consequently causing the government to flee. For Jacquot, who had heard the account of the smashed shop windows and the persecutions of Kristallnacht, from the very mouths of German Jews during a meal, in the back room of the butcher’s shop in 1938, there was no longer any question of continuing. He asked for his pay, and, after a month, he returned to Paris. It was July 1940.

In Paris, Jacquot felt relatively carefree. His father was training him in the butcher’s trade and took him to the slaughterhouses of La Villette to help him carry the half-carcasses of beef that he bought. The rest of the time, he met up with his pals, with whom he went dancing the bolero his sister Dora had taught him at the Java, the dance hall located on rue du Faubourg-du-Temple. From there, he set off with his gang to confront a group of young men belonging to the newspaper Le Pilori (some of whom were former classmates) and to prevent them from attacking the Jews who were resting in a square on the Place de la République.

This relative tranquility did not last. Following the decree of October 4, 1940, foreign Jews, aged eighteen to fifty, were summoned to the police station of the 20th arrondissement, at the Tourelles swimming pool, Métro Porte des Lilas. Jacquot’s father had also received the “green ticket” summoning him, but he had been released because of his age (he was then fifty-five). Albert Gottlib was summoned in his turn, as was Henri Badever; both were arrested and taken to the internment camp of Pithiviers in the Loiret, eighty kilometers south of Paris.

In October 1941, Jacquot, who was strolling with his band of pals on the grands boulevards between the Rex and rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis, after having gone to the cinema, was stopped by the police. He was the only foreign Jew in the group, and he was the only one whose name and address the police took down. On returning home, Jacquot spoke of the episode and expressed his fears of being arrested in his turn. He took the decision to cross into the free zone. His father immediately agreed. He gave ten thousand francs to his son and made inquiries around him to learn through what place one had to transit; he thus learned the name of the café one had to apply to in order to cross the demarcation line, at Montceau-les-Mines.

So Jacquot took a bag containing food and boarded, the very next day, a train bound for Montceau-les-Mines. At seventeen, he was puny; as a precaution he dressed in short trousers. Whoever saw him would have given him barely fourteen years. The crossing of the demarcation line did not happen as planned. Jacquot did indeed go to see the smuggler, but when the latter asked him for five thousand francs to cross the line, judging the price exorbitant, he replied that he did not have enough money. He left the café and stopped a few meters away. Then he waited until evening, the moment when the smuggler would take his clandestine passengers across. He followed them and thus crossed the line unseen. On the other side, he slipped into the taxi that was waiting for them, paid the two hundred francs the driver demanded to take them to the Mâcon station. From there, he took the train to Lyon.

The Ruffieux labor camp

When his sister Blanche saw Jacquot, she welcomed him with open arms. She had just given birth to her first daughter, Brigitte. But he could stay only a month with them, and found himself in a precarious situation. He took refuge, at night, on the premises of the Salvation Army, with two school pals he had found again in Lyon, the brothers Jacques and Albert Rubin; during the day they wandered the streets together. But one day in November 1941, the three boys were stopped by police inspectors who asked them for their identity papers, and who, learning that they were without employment, sent them to the foreign workers’ camp at Ruffieux,7 in Savoie.

It was the French government that had created these internment camps for all foreign males without work or resources. These camps were guarded by French gendarmes. The one at Ruffieux was located north of the Lac du Bourget, in the Chautagne. First occupied from September 1940 by Polish and Spanish workers, it had become in the autumn of 1941 a specifically Jewish camp; two hundred and fifty persons were interned there.

The camps consisted of barracks, in which bunk beds were arranged. The men received no wages. The work was very hard: clearing brush, digging canals along the fields to allow the water to flow, felling trees, but also carrying railway rails to set them in place. Food was scarce and hygiene conditions deplorable.8

At the turn of the year 1941–1942, a relative freedom still reigned at Ruffieux. To be sure, the camp was guarded, but one could manage a little time to rest near the reeds, as soon as the gendarmes had their backs turned; one could also have ties with the outside and receive a few money orders from family. In the evening, the prisoners could gather in peace. Jacquot made the acquaintance of Raymond Grynstein, who was to upend his life; with him, he talked a great deal. Hunger, ever-present, constituted a point of fixation. Jacquot, the butcher’s son, was put to use: one day he killed a crow with a stone and cooked it in a mess tin in the dormitory; another time, it was a horse that the internees had bought from a neighboring peasant and that they divided among all the barracks.

One day Jacquot contracted bakers’ scabies, probably while cleaning the barracks and the bunks. He was sent to the hospital in Chambéry, where he stayed four or five days. Whenever he had the chance, he went to stroll in the streets of the town, but he did not think of escaping. Why? As long as one had something to eat, one had the impression of being a little protected, he explains. And then, how could one imagine surviving without papers and without money outside the camp and with clothes in tatters?9

The three friends were freed one day in June: a social services commission had declared their internment illegal, since they were not yet eighteen. They had been at the camp for six months. Two months later, the camp was encircled by gendarmes and the great roundup of August 26 took place: a hundred and seventy internees were deported to Drancy and then to Auschwitz.

Lyon, in prison for the black market

On leaving the Ruffieux camp, Jacques, Albert, and Jacquot received a voucher to be lodged at the refugee center on rue Lafontaine, in Villeurbanne. They began again to live by their wits; they met up in a café on the Place Sathonay to play cards and billiards, and in the street to play football. Shortly after his arrival in Lyon, in July, Jacquot had the joy of finding again Raymond Grynstein, who had managed to escape from the camp and had come to join him.

Raymond then proposed to Jacquot that they live together. They found a room on rue Clos Suiffon, in Lyon. They paid the rent by engaging in the black market. They also earned a little money playing poker in the Salle Rameau with other young people. It was there that Jacquot made the acquaintance of three young men, Daniel, Pott, and Maurice, who, like him, were to enter the Resistance. In August, a relative of Pott’s arrived, Maurice Mirowski (alias “Germain”), who was a member of the Communist Youth. It was he who informed them of the roundup that had taken place in Paris on July 16. He proposed that they distribute clandestine newspapers into letterboxes. It was thus that they took, without really being aware of it, their first steps into the Resistance.

Antoine found work on a construction site, Jacquot carried parcels to people’s homes, and continued to engage in the black market, with his pals from the Salle Rameau. One day in October, returning from the station, Pott and Daniel, who were carrying two suitcases full of chicken and butter, were followed and were stopped at the bottom of the stairway of Jacquot’s building. It was the police. The three of them were arrested and sent to Saint-Paul prison. Five in a tiny cell. On December 20, after two months in prison, they came up for trial in the very early afternoon. They had to pay a small fine and were released straightaway. By a matter of hours, the German ordinance allowing the Germans to come for imprisoned Jews the moment they left prison and to send them to the transit camp of Royallieu, at Compiègne, from which they were deported, was applied. All those who came out the next morning were deported.

Entry into the Resistance

On leaving prison, Jacquot and Raymond had to move. The police knew their address and they were now aware of the risk of deportation. They found lodging in a room on the second floor of a building located at 5 Cour du Sud in Villeurbanne. The Rubin brothers lodged on the first floor.

They began again to distribute leaflets and to write on the walls calls to resist, under the direction of Germain. In the first months of the year 1943, after the clandestine creation of the UJRE (Union des Juifs pour la Résistance et l’Entraide, Union of Jews for Resistance and Mutual Aid) and of the UJJ (Union de la Jeunesse Juive, Union of Jewish Youth), their actions took a more offensive turn: they set about attacking distribution centers for food ration tickets and destroying with explosives the transformers meant to supply the factories with power…

Raymond felt that they were still not going far enough, and, in March 1943, he requested his incorporation into the FTP-MOI (Francs-Tireurs et Partisans–Main-d’Œuvre Immigrée). He was immediately accepted and took the name of “Antoine.” Jacquot’s request was refused. He was thought too young and without real political consciousness.

The Lyon group of the FTP-MOI, the “Carmagnole detachment,” had formed in the course of the summer of 1942. It depended, like all the other groups, on the Communist Party. It comprised at the start between five and ten fighters, all Jews of foreign origin. The group began its actions of armed struggle in November, when the Germans set about occupying the southern zone.

The date of October 21, 1943, is well known: it is indeed that of the attack organized by Lucie Aubrac on the German prison van returning from rue Berthelot, where the headquarters of the Lyon Gestapo was located. This van was taking prisoners to Fort Montluc to have them shot. In the prison van, thirteen other persons were locked up with Raymond Aubrac. Most belonged to the groupe franc of the MUR (Mouvements Unis de Résistance), but among them figured also two members of the Carmagnole group, “Robert” Tronchon (Joseph Halaubaumer) and “André” Buisson (Maurice Gurfinkel). The two men, when the doors of the van opened, chose not to get into the cars heading for the maquis of the “Groupes Francs” and to join Raymond, whose address they knew and who was part of their group. Their leader, Romain Krakus, alerted by Antoine, told them to remain hidden for a while at Raymond and Jacquot’s place, until a way could be found to get them away elsewhere.

While the two men holed up in the room, Jacquot saw to the provisioning. This lasted three days. On the third day, October 24, 1943, two Gestapo men dressed in civilian clothes knocked at the door. Antoine, who thought it was Jacquot returning, opened without suspicion. The Gestapo men discovered Robert and André, whose swollen faces said well enough where they had come from.

The moment Jacquot was entering the building, laden with his shopping net for lunch, he felt himself seized and pulled back into the corridor. Inside the building stood a civilian and a soldier in uniform carrying a submachine gun. The civilian asked Jacquot where he lived; he replied that he lived on the first floor. The man then ordered him not to move. Three minutes later, Jacquot saw his three pals come down, in shirtsleeves, hands in the air. Two men behind them threatened them with their revolvers. They passed in front of him.

The two civilians went back up to the room, to search for proof of resistance. The military man in uniform kept Jacquot at the bottom of the stairway. The three pals, threatened by the third Gestapo man, got into the back of a Citroën traction parked in front of the building. André and Robert had been tortured, and Robert had said that he would never fall back alive into the hands of the Germans. Robert leaped over the seat to grab the revolver aimed at them, Antoine wrenched it away; he fired on the military man against whom Jacquot had thrown himself to prevent him from using his weapon, and on the Gestapo man who was fighting with Robert. Then he fled with Robert along the cours Émile-Zola while Jacquot ran off on his side, dragging André with him.

The Gestapo men who were in the room, hearing the gunshots, pursued Antoine and Robert and fired. They hit the latter. Antoine replied with a burst of submachine-gun fire. He loaded the wounded Robert onto his back and carried him for a while. Then he laid him down in the corridor of a building, telling him that he was going to seek reinforcements to take him away. But when Germain, alerted by Antoine, returned with a car to fetch him, Robert had disappeared. It is supposed today that Robert was found, taken away, interrogated, and executed by the Germans.10

It was as a result of this action that Jacquot was admitted to the “Bataillon Carmagnole” of the FTP-MOI of Lyon, under the pseudonym of “Jean Servais” (registration number 94100), and then to the “Liberté” Detachment.

The resistance of the FTP-MOI

The FTP-MOI leaders announced to Jacquot and Antoine, a few days later, their departure for Grenoble. In Lyon, they were wanted. Grenoble was a city that had been occupied by the Italian army from November 11, 1942. But following the Armistice of Cassibile between Italy and the Allies on September 8, 1943, the German troops replaced the Italian troops.11

The “Liberté detachment” had been created in March 1943 by a Jewish student of Polish origin, Léon Gaist. It was composed of some thirty resisters,12 of foreign origin, and most often Jews. They were all between eighteen and twenty-five years old.

Antoine and Jacquot were admitted into the group of Raymond (Nathan) Saks. From his arrival, Jacquot received a brief training in the use of weapons in the forest, after which he took direct part in the actions. The urban resistance work of the Grenoble FTP-MOI was the same as that of the other armed groups: grenade attacks on Nazi groups, attacks on German officers, derailments and sabotage of trains transporting German merchandise or soldiers, attacks on factories, destruction of transformers, executions of militiamen. The important thing was to undermine German morale and to give the enemy a sense of insecurity. I will recall here only a few of these actions.13

In December 1943 took place the execution of a militiaman in the middle of the street. Antoine was in command: he had charged Yves and Jacquot with firing and was providing cover with another resister. Jacquot killed the militiaman, but the latter was not alone. There ensued an exchange of fire, in the course of which Jacquot was hit by a bullet that passed through his thigh. The four resisters fled on bicycles they had procured for the mission. The wounded Jacquot leaned on Yves; they waited in a room for Antoine to return with a car to take Jacquot away and have him treated. He drove him to the Thiers clinic to have him operated on by a surgeon. There, they saw the militiaman they had killed, lying on a stretcher.

This first successful action gave Jacquot a certain authority. He was put in charge of questioning those who wished to enter the Resistance and of testing their motivations. By that date, recruitment was often done by co-optation: if some were driven by their Communist convictions, a certain number, less politicized, entered the Resistance because they had met some comrade or other who already belonged to a network. It was thus that Jacquot brought in former comrades from the Ramponneau school and the Julien-Lacroix school who had found themselves in Grenoble: Guy Landowicz, Étienne Raczymow, Robert Pessac.14

One action made a great stir. The group had the mission of freeing “Jacques” (Henri Dalloz), who had been arrested in the street because he was riding a stolen bicycle. The group was composed of three newcomers (Étienne, Daniel, and Guy) and Jacquot. As they were walking two by two so as not to be spotted, and as, warned by one of their own that Jacques had not been convicted, they were preparing to disperse, they saw four men dressed in civilian clothes rush toward them, two in front, two behind. They were inspectors. The first two asked Jacquot and Étienne for their identity cards. Jacquot handed over his own, which was made out in the name of Gaston Largeault, then he stepped away, turning around and shouting at them: “Hands up—Resistance.” He had only four bullets in his magazine, for, that very morning, he had been given the mission, with other resisters, of killing three Gestapo agents. He fired two bullets at the two men, killing one and wounding the other. The other two pursued them. Guy Landowicz was arrested as he fled and could not use his grenade. Taken to the Grenoble prison, then to that of Lyon, he was executed eight days later, before the group had time to free him. The police had his identity card and his photo. It thus became impossible to remain in Grenoble; Jacquot resigned himself to leaving Antoine and returning to Lyon.

It was in April or May 1944 that Jacquot learned that his sisters, Rose and Jeannette (who was then only fifteen), had been deported. In 1942, they had obtained an “Ausweis” and had remained in Paris, where they worked for furriers.15 When Hélène, Albert’s sister, had proposed that they cross the demarcation line, they had followed her. But they had been betrayed by the smuggler.

In Jacquot’s group, the resisters were dying. Many of them. Annette Wieviorka reports that nearly fifty percent of the resisters of Carmagnole and Liberté died in combat.16 It was first Simon Fryd who was condemned to death by the French prosecutor, Faure-Pinguély, and guillotined.

On April 24, 1944, Antoine, the very dear friend, fell in his turn, returning from a resistance action. He had set off with his group to blow up a hydroelectric plant at Séchilienne, outside Grenoble. When the Germans made them get off the tram, at Saint-Martin-d’Hères, to check their identity, Antoine fired on the German who had drawn level with him. Pursued, wounded, encircled, he blew apart his own chest with a grenade whose pin he pulled, taking the Nazi soldiers around him to their deaths. Antoine’s death remained, throughout Jacquot’s life, an open wound.

The actions multiplied at an uninterrupted pace. Two-thirds of the acts of sabotage and the attacks that took place that year in the Lyon conurbation were the work of the “Carmagnole” group. To their credit, from February 1943 to August 23, 1944, one counts about two hundred individual or collective actions, that is to say nearly thirteen actions per month.17

It was Jacquot who interviewed a young man slightly older than himself, Henri Krischer, who quickly won his stripes and was promoted leader of the Carmagnole detachment. Among the notable actions they led together: actions of unbolting railway tracks; attacks on factories (such as that of the Gerland factory specializing in the manufacture of chemical products); attacks on garages aimed at sabotaging enemy vehicles, stored there to be repaired. Thus, on July 3, 1944, the group attacked the Gambetta garage.18 Everything was going well, the dynamiting was set off, when the garage was encircled by GMR (Groupe Mobile de Réserve) and Germans. The group managed to flee over the rooftops, passing along a beam and going out through a skylight, but one of the women resisters, Jeanine Sontag, fell, after slipping because of her wooden soles. She then handed her revolver to Jacquot, who wanted to go and fetch her, saying that she was going to see the manager to ask him to help her. Denounced, arrested, tortured, imprisoned at Fort Montluc, she was finally executed with a submachine gun along with a hundred and twenty people at Saint-Genis-Laval.

Certain large-scale actions required the intervention of the enlarged group. When the Carmagnole battalion decided to attempt the disarming of a unit of a hundred and twenty GMR installed in the premises of the Édouard-Herriot school group, in the Montplaisir quarter, in order to recover their weapons and make them cease fighting, the Simon Fryd group (the numbers having grown, a second group had had to be formed) and Jewish combat groups joined in. Following Henri Krischer’s intervention, thirty-four GMR agreed to join the maquis of La Croix-du-Ban, organized since the month of June 1944 in the hills near Saint-Pierre-la-Palud. Jacquot drove them there, in trucks filled with equipment.

The Villeurbanne insurrection

The Villeurbanne insurrection constitutes an episode of these war years today somewhat better known, thanks in particular to the works of A. Wieviorka and above all of C. Collin. For a long time the event remained ignored.

For several months certain members of the Carmagnole group had been imprisoned in the Lyon prisons, and it had been decided to attempt to free them. On August 22 Raymond Saks, the group’s military leader, and ten other persons had managed to escape from Saint-Jean prison, but Gaby (Max Szulewicz) and Julien (Charles Kupfermunz) were still incarcerated in Saint-Paul prison, where they had been serving their sentence since the month of June. August 24 was the date chosen to free them. Some policemen had agreed to put vehicles at the disposal of the resisters. All the fighters of the FTP-MOI of Lyon met up that morning, at Villeurbanne. They were waiting in the street for the arrival of the policemen and were putting on the FFI armband. It was then that some Germans spotted them and fired. One of the resisters, Édouard, received an explosive bullet in the leg, which had to be amputated.

But just as the resisters were beginning to fall back, they were cheered on by the population, with cries of “Long live the maquis!” Henri Krischer, obeying the directives of their commander (Lefort), then entered the town hall and drove out the municipal council, which was holding a meeting. He occupied with his men several buildings, including the post office and the police station. Meanwhile, hundreds of people gathered in front of the town hall refused to disperse. Barricades went up, “Barricade Jacquot,” “Barricade Serge,” “Barricade Frédéric”…19 On the evening of the 24th, Gaby and Julien were freed from Saint-Paul prison.

Thus, whereas the objective had been only the liberation of resisters, one found oneself facing an almost spontaneous insurrection of the population of Villeurbanne. On August 25, the general strike was declared; resisters then flocked in from other groups. Jacquot, Serge, and Frédéric Daudy were promoted to “company commanders”; exchanges of fire took place in the course of which there were more than a hundred wounded.

On August 26, German armored vehicles went into action. The resisters tried to extend the insurrection. Jacquot set off for Vénissieux, at the head of a group of a hundred and twenty men who installed themselves in the “horseshoe” factory to organize the defense of the place. The “horseshoe” factory was attacked by an armored vehicle and a troop of Germans. There was fighting; some of the resisters were killed. But faced with the imbalance of forces, Jacquot was compelled to organize the retreat from the rear. The siege was lifted, and the population had to dismantle the barricades, under the threat of German weapons. The resisters had to disperse and go into hiding.

The historians of the period agree in thinking that, if the Villeurbanne insurrection did not succeed, it nevertheless had a psychological effect on the resisters and the population and very probably hastened the march of the maquis on Lyon. On September 2, Villeurbanne was liberated with the intervention of the “Carmagnole” (Lyon), “Henri Barbusse” (Savoie), and “Liberté” (Grenoble) battalions. On September 3, it was the turn of the city of Lyon. As Annette Wieviorka writes: “Along with that of Paris, the only urban insurrection, even if it did not result in driving out the Germans, was that of Villeurbanne.”20

After the liberation of Villeurbanne, the resisters of the Carmagnole and Liberté battalions were sent to the Cusset barracks, where they were given a uniform. They were incorporated into the First Regiment of the Rhône. The resisters wanted to keep fighting and crush Nazism.

Jacquot then received the mission order to go to the barracks to lead the first delegates of the southern zone of the Communist Party to Paris, where the first meeting of the central committee was being held on September 15, 1944. As soon as he could, he went to see his father. The latter had survived the war by hiding, first in a hotel room concealed behind a wardrobe, a stone’s throw from rue Ramponneau, then in a cellar on rue Vilin. Following the episode of the inspectors, Monsieur Largeault had received a visit from the French police to investigate the man named Gaston Largeault, whose identity card they had and whose death they announced. Of course, this was false, but Monsieur Largeault did not know it; he passed on to Simon Szmulewicz the news of Jacquot’s death. And so, when the latter appeared one day in September 1944, his father fainted. The emotion was too strong.

Jacquot stayed three days with him, then returned to the barracks. In the month of November 1944, he was sent, with eighty-nine other resisters, coming from different backgrounds, to the military school of Saint-Genis-Laval. Seven of them came from the “Carmagnole” battalion. They were attached to the Fifth Moroccan Artillery Regiment as officer cadets. In this capacity, Jacquot took part in the capture of Belfort (November 20–25), of Thann (December 8), and of Guebwiller (February 4, 1945). It was there that he officially earned his lieutenant’s stripes. Then he was entrusted with command of a fort at Modane, in the Maurienne valley. In May 1945 he was demobilized, at the same time as his comrades. The time of war was over.

The return to civilian life was difficult. First, one had to confront the loss of one’s own: his three sisters, Nadia, Rose, and Jeannette, and his two brothers-in-law, Adolphe and Albert. It was indeed only after the war that he learned they had been deported (he already knew the fate of Rose and Jeannette). Nadia had been taken directly from Bordeaux to Drancy, after having entrusted her son Boris to the public welfare service. She had been murdered at Auschwitz on July 24, 1942. Adolphe, after enlisting in the Legion, had been wounded in combat and put to death on December 12, 1943;21 Albert had been deported from the Pithiviers camp and gassed on August 12, 1942. To tell the truth, in 1945, Jacquot still held out hope of finding them alive. He often went to the Hôtel Lutetia. In vain. A search request concerning Jeannette yielded nothing.

Life resumed its course. In 1945, then aged twenty-one, he wanted to go back to school in Lyon and take his baccalauréat. But his schooling came to an abrupt end; a telephone call called him back to Paris: his sick father needed him at the butcher’s shop. He died in March 1946. Jacquot worked six months alongside his stepmother, but the trade did not please him; he gave up the butcher’s shop.

Jacquot found himself faced with the necessity of choosing a trade. He could not manage to settle on one. The furrier’s trade occupied him four months of the year, between September and December; the rest of the time he supervised young people. He looked after first of all a group of fifteen or twenty children belonging to the “Vaillants” of the 20th arrondissement. He became secretary of the Paul Vaillant-Couturier circle of the UJRF (Union de la Jeunesse Républicaine de France), which he helped to create. This circle developed very quickly, and soon numbered a hundred members. In 1947 he had the responsibility of directing all the circles of this Paris arrondissement, with two other young men, Henri Krasucki and Paul Laurent. From 1950 to 1953, during the summer, he was a counselor in the summer camps of the Commission Centrale de l’Enfance (CCE). These camps took in Jewish orphans whose parents had died in the extermination camps. He thus went off to La Féclaz in Savoie, to Tarnos near Biarritz, and to Stella-Plage for two years running. He took along his nephew Boris, who, after the war, had been taken in by Dora.

The rest of the time he set off on the roads with a tent. He thus made the tour of France, with one or two pals he would meet at agreed-upon places.

I will pass over in silence the years that followed, which led him to settle in Nancy, where he rejoined former comrades from the MOI, among them Henri Krischer, with whom he went into business. Jacquot remained all his life a militant. In 1960 he stopped renewing his card in the Communist Party, which had concealed, from the Liberation onward, the action of the foreign resisters, and to the truth of which he opened his eyes belatedly. He continued to give of himself to defend the values dear to him within the ANACR (Association Nationale des Anciens Combattants et Résistants) and the MRAP, and to have the action of his Resistance comrades recognized. He himself, to whom the French government had refused naturalization in 1946 and who until 1970 was stateless, saw his heroic commitment officially rewarded. In 1982, he was awarded the medal of the Ordre National du Mérite, and, in 1991, the prime minister received him at Matignon to present him with the Légion d’Honneur with the rank of Chevalier.

As he advances in age, he has an acute consciousness of the duty of memory. For years he has taken an active part in the committee of rue Tlemcen of the 20th arrondissement of Paris, which then extended, under other names, to all the Paris schools. He sought the names of the children in the school registers and took part in the ceremonies in the course of which memorial plaques were affixed, recalling the responsibility of the Vichy government in their deaths.

He also spared no effort to shed light on what the Resistance was, and to give existence to the memory of those he loved and who died in combat. Because he believes that one must continue to fight with words after having fought with weapons, he has tirelessly visited the collèges and lycées of France and given his testimony on the Shoah and on the Resistance; he has also gone to Germany to explain his action in the ranks of the FTP-MOI before assemblies of militants gathered to fight against the resurgence of neo-Nazism.

No summary, however faithful it may be, could surely give an account of so rich a life. But I believe that, for all those who know him, two major traits characterize his trajectory: the coherence of his commitment and the faithfulness of his friendship.

*

In completing these lines, am I able to answer the question: “What have we done with our history?” This question touches sensitive fibers within me. The history of my family has inhabited me since I have been old enough to hear it. As a child, I dreamed a great deal of Jeannette, who died too young, and of Boris, who had miraculously survived. In adolescence, I remember the emotion that overwhelmed me when I recited in class Aragon’s poem “Ballade de celui qui chanta dans les supplices” (“Ballad of the One Who Sang Under Torture”). My father’s resister friends, I loved them—and I let their history rub up against my own, and sometimes overrun it. But when Henri Krischer, known as the “Admiral,” proposed that I center my literary research on the Shoah and the Resistance, I turned my back on History, opting for objects of study that were a priori the furthest from it. What he asked of me was impossible, for want of sufficient distance.

But at the same time, I have always had an acute sense of passing time and of disappearance. My maternal grandparents still spoke a little Yiddish; at their death, I no longer heard it. So I have always thought that one had to keep a trace of this past. I began to gather fragments of it, little by little. Yet this material would no doubt have slept a long while still in my boxes, had Carole Matheron, whom I thank here, not proposed that I tell my father’s story in this issue centered on transmission. She thus gave me the necessary impetus to return to this account begun a few years earlier and to flesh it out. I focused my attention on the war years, and I pruned so that my account would fit within the allotted dimensions. There remains, of course, much to say.

Anne Geisler-Szmulewicz

Select bibliography

BRUNIER, Cédric, Les Juifs en Savoie de 1940 à 1944, Mémoires et documents de la Société Savoisienne d’Histoire et d’Archéologie, 2002.

COLLIN, Claude, 24-26 août 1944. L’insurrection de Villeurbanne a-t-elle eu lieu ?, Presses universitaires de Grenoble, “Résistances,” 1994.

COLLIN, Claude, Carmagnole et liberté. Les étrangers dans la résistance en Rhône-Alpes, Presses universitaires de Grenoble, “Résistances,” 2000.

DIAMANT, David, Le Billet vert. La vie et la résistance à Pithiviers et Beaune-la-Rolande, camps pour juifs, camps pour chrétiens, camps pour patriotes, éditions Renouveau, 1977.

GIOLITTO, Pierre, Grenoble 40-44, Paris, Perrin, 2001.

WIEVIORKA, Annette, Ils étaient Juifs, résistants, communistes, Paris, Denoël, 1986.

ZANTMAN, Claude-Andrée, Le passage du témoin. Récit., opta, 1977.

Filmography

COLLIN, Claude, and CUGNOD, Denis, Étrangers et nos frères pourtant, FTP-MOI à Lyon et Grenoble, 1994, 2 episodes, Betacam SP.

BAYOU, Pierre, Une petite haine (chroniques de vie), January 2006 (screened at the Mémorial de la Shoah and at the Festival isérois du film sur la résistance in 2007).

Les garçons Ramponneau, testimonies of Étienne Raczymow, Jacob Szmulewicz, Gaston Largeault, directed by Patrice SPADONI, “Biographies populaires,” box set of 4 DVDs, Canal Marches.

Nous étions des enfants, directed by Jean-Gabriel Carasso, DVD box set (interview with Jacob Szmulewicz “Jacquot”), Comité “École de la rue Tlemcen,” 2010.

Notes

  1. I warmly thank Alain Maruani for his attentive and cordial proofreading.↩︎

  2. See Claude Collin, afterword, in Jean Ottavi, Des années blanches et noires. Du front populaire à l’insurrection de Villeurbanne, Lyon, Éditions BGA Permezel, “Couleurs du temps” collection, 1995, p. 167.↩︎

  3. See Annette Wieviorka, Ils étaient juifs, résistants, communistes, Paris, Denoël, 1986, p. 122.↩︎

  4. Even if the celebrations had nothing to do then with those of today, certain families organized a great feast in honor of the bar mitzvah, in which they gathered relatives and friends.↩︎

  5. Ibid., p. 67.↩︎

  6. The mourners’ Kaddish, that is to say the prayer recited at the time of funerals.↩︎

  7. On the Ruffieux camp and the other camps of Savoie, see Cédric Brunier, Les Juifs en Savoie de 1940 à 1944, Mémoires et documents de la Société Savoisienne d’Histoire et d’Archéologie, 2002.↩︎

  8. Ibid., p. 73.↩︎

  9. Cédric Brunier, Ibid., p. 83, note 109.↩︎

  10. See also, as a complement, the article by Patrick Salotti, “Villeurbanne, 1943. La ‘Fusillade du Cours du Sud,’” revue 39/45, no. 230, January 2006, p. 29.↩︎

  11. See Pierre Giolitto, Grenoble 40-44, Perrin, 2001, pp. 149–150.↩︎

  12. Ibid., p. 172.↩︎

  13. On the “botched” supervision of the demonstration of the people of Dauphiné on November 11, 1943, see P. Giolitto, Ibid., pp. 247–255, and Annie Kriegel, Ce que j’ai cru comprendre, Paris, R. Laffont, “Notre époque,” 1991, p. 213.↩︎

  14. He would in the same way bring in, in 1944, two old friends from the Julien-Lacroix school: Henri Hoche (Emeri) and Jacques Kypmann, whom he had met in the street in Lyon.↩︎

  15. On the activity of the furriers during the war, see S. Cukier, D. Decèze, D. Diamant, M. Grojnowski, Juifs révolutionnaires, Messidor, éditions sociales, 1987, p. 160.↩︎

  16. Wieviorka, op. cit., p. 175.↩︎

  17. See Carmagnole liberté, Amicale des Anciens Francs-Tireurs et Partisans de la Main-d’Œuvre Immigrée (FTP-MOI) Région Rhône-Alpes, Toulouse, 1994, p. 12, and for the enumeration of these actions, pp. 50–73.↩︎

  18. See Collin, Carmagnole et Liberté. Les étrangers dans la Résistance, Grenoble, PUG, 2000, pp. 118–155.↩︎

  19. See A. Wieviorka, op. cit., p. 311.↩︎

  20. Ibid., p. 312.↩︎

  21. Adolphe was wounded at Soissons, taken to the Mérignac camp, then deported. On Adolphe and Nadia, see Boris Cyrulnik’s latest book, Sauve-toi, la vie t’appelle, Paris, Odile Jacob, 2012, pp. 17–19.↩︎

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